”A hundred thousand welcomes! I could weep, And I could laugh; I am light, and heavy. Welcome!”
— William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Coriolanus
*
At the risk of repeating herself, she revisited her friend’s novel.
For the pleasure of repeating herself, she titled the notebook page with the same quote she had used when previously considering her friend’s novel.
I have been a prisoner all my life, she thought. And I can say to you that I don’t remember.
Meanwhile, her friend thought:
And now, as she thought about it longer, she returned to her original resentment which had now clarified itself in the afternoon light, elongated by Daylight Savings Time. There it was: a birdsong coming from the front shrub! Chirpings and greenery and spring and really, what she resented most was the thrilling passage on how it would feel to read The Magic Mountain, a passage her friend had clearly stolen from her own thoughts and edited, since she would never credit a book by Thomas Mann with that sort of resplendent memory — she would never lie to students in such a way— but would admit, instead, that “None of you will forget where you were or what you were doing when you first read Jean Genet or Henry Miller.”
Her friend had admitted as much in a different paragraph, namely, one that began with the confession: “My heart is not pure.”
Her friend said:
She said:
I have heard this refrain before, and of course Thomas Mann (in his great ignorance) said you can never go home again, but others have the said the same thing, more effectively, and there is in fact a video in which another great artist said as much, which I have shared below.
And then, because the beautiful birds would not shut up, not even for a minute, and the entire world seemed to be slurping a slushee composed of sunshine, she also recalled, apropos of nihilism, how Pirandello had once offered his Theory of the Sack, a theory which seemed particularly comforting amid the insouciant chirps on her front porch, thus causing her to excerpt the meatiest portion of it below, in case the smut-loving novelist, or any of her other many smut-loving friends, should need it:
THE MOTHER
And how was I to divine all this sentiment in him?
THE FATHER
That is exactly your mistake, never to have guessed any of my sentiments.
THE STEPDAUGHTER
— all this philosophy that uncover is the beast and man, and then seeks to save him, excuse him… I can’t stand it, sir. When a man seeks to simplify life beastially, throwing aside every relative humidity, every chaste aspiration, every pure feeling, all sense of id reality, duty, modesty, shame… Then nothing is more revolting and nauseous, and a certain kind of remorse.
THE FATHER
But a fact, is like a sack which won’t stand up when it is empty. In order that it may stand up, one has to put into it the reason and sentiment which have caused it to exist.